As a result of an iniquitous, wasteful expenditure of my time, energies, and eye health last afternoon staring at my computer screen ─ possibly five hours' worth of staring, if not even longer ─ I had no time to blog here.
Probably only because I became so depleted from the vile preoccupation was I able to pull myself from the usual denouement, thus sparing myself from suffering through today with depression and self-loathing.
Yesterday began reasonably well, even though I did not manage to get to bed Friday evening until nearly midnight. As I said in Friday's post, the plan was to hike three or miles to a Real Canadian Superstore outlet (as identified on this Google map) that I have not visited in at least 20 years.
The store was advertised as opening at 7:00 a.m., so I hoped to leave here around 6:00 a.m. However, getting to bed as late as I did meant I would fail to rise as early as I would need to, since I would want to have a mug of hot instant coffee before leaving ─ I do not soon nor easily normalize after getting up in the morning.
My journey was not to commence until 6:22 a.m., but at least it was still dark ─ and barely even dawn by the time I got to the store. In fact, not two blocks from the store I had felt the need to micturate, so I did so just off King George Boulevard, and under the shelter of a stretch of evergreen trees ─ it was still so dark that there was no chance any occupants of passing vehicles would have been able to notice me tending to nature there behind a tree trunk.
I had brought two of my own bags for whatever I might buy ─ one was a gym-style tote bag that rolls up nicely, and the other was a reusable shopping bag that I rolled up right along with the tote bag so that they were one combined roll that I was carrying in a hand.
I had four items in mind to look for in the store.
When I used to shop at that store two decades and more ago, as soon as one entered the main doors, anyone carrying packs and such were met by a custodian who ensured that the customers left such items in the storage receptacles built into what may have been two or three shelving units that were set up so that the area the custodian was in charge of was almost like a temporary room.
Each shelf of these quite large shelving units was segmented into numerous compartments for such storage of customers' baggage.
As I wondered in Friday's post, was this rather customer-unfriendly process still in play in our current era of recyclable shopping bags and the encouraged minimization of one-use plastic shopping bags?
To my delight, no such policing of customer baggage seemed in evidence, although I do wonder what the situation would be if a customer entered the store wearing an actual backpack.
One of the items I was determined to acquire was liquid whipping cream ─ I use it in my coffee instead of the 'watered down' products the Dairy Industry flogs as cream for such beverages. That stuff barely seems any creamier than whole milk when applied to coffee.
What especially intrigued me about this supermarket's whipping cream was that the brand was one I had not before seen for sale anywhere that I shop ─ and instead of the 33% butterfat content of the Dairyland brand that I am always exposed to in stores, Lactantia boasts 35% butterfat:
Oddly, there were other Lactantia dairy products, but not the whipping cream. Evidently the sale I saw online was probably one happening back in Ontario or more easterly provinces than British Columbia.
However, at least the Dairyland whipping cream was also on sale ─ two for $7.18 ─ 80¢ cheaper overall than Lactantia.
So maybe I really did get the better deal?
The cheapest Dairyland whipping cream available to me close to home is at a No Frills store where it presently sells for $5.15 a litre. That same litre-quantity of Dairyland whipping cream bought singly at the Superstore would have cost me $5.48.
It's a shame that No Frills doesn't have some sort of "multi" offer on the cream, too.
As for the other items I sought, one was natural peanut butter. I hoped to find a large container of the stuff ─ at least two litres. Maybe they would even sell the Golden Boy 4½-litre pails that I sometimes (rarely) see available at Save-On-Foods.
I had no good luck.
Nor did I have good luck with extra old cheddar cheese. My hope was to perhaps find a decent-sized quantity of some 'no name' brand, but they only sold the 400-gramme Presidents Choice brand that is available at No Frills (for just a cent more).
The fourth item was one that is not available at No Frills or Save-On-Foods where I usually hike to in order to do my grocery shopping ─ 3-kilogramme containers of honey.
I knew for certain that the honey was in stock there. I opted to buy the creamed variety rather than the liquid because the creamed was $1.00 cheaper. Since the liquid honey has been so thoroughly 'cooked' (or pasteurized) and strained until there are no longer any living enzymes or bee pollen remaining in it, and the creamed honey is probably just the same stuff whipped with air, I decided to save the buck and buy the creamed at $21.98.
That same brand at No Frills in the litre size costs $8.17. Thus, three of them would have cost me $24.51.
Save-On-Foods currently has a sale on their Western Family creamed honey in the kilogramme size, but even as a sale it's priced at $9.49 ($10.99 normally).
In general terms, the walk would have been well worth the effort despite the failure to find everything I had hoped to find, but I physically suffered for it on this occasion.
Within the past couple of years at very most, it sometimes happens when I am walking for any distance ─ that is, a couple or more miles ─ that something gradually goes amiss with my left foot. Specifically, I start to lose the ability to use the ball of my foot ─ along with the toes ─ to push off each time I take a step with that leg.
Ultimately, I end up walking flat-footed with that leg ─ it is as if I have become crippled.
I have thought that something awry happens with my foot's arch, but yesterday ─ when this condition developed when I was about halfway to the Superstore ─ the identification of the problem became clear as I miserably made my way homeward after shopping.
After about a half mile of the three-mile homeward haul, I had become so incapacitated that ─ had I the means ─ I would have seriously courted the idea of getting a taxi.
By the time I was a mile into that trip, I was walking like a very old man ─ of course, at 70 years of age, I am hardly young, but normally I can walk with vigour. Had there been no one to witness, I would have been hobbling, and perhaps even throwing forward my left leg's flat foot.
Because I had to endure such a distance as I did that morning, the cause became apparent for the very first time ─ it has nothing to do with my arch. The problem lies with the muscle that runs up and down at the outside edge of my shin.
It somehow starts to seize up as if slowly developing into a cramped state that entirely prohibits the ability to rise up on the ball of the foot.
It is not possible to properly walk without that ability. One cannot lift off with that leg and foot so as to take a proper step.
The whole scenario became distinctly embarrassing, and I rued that it was not dark so that no one could see the pathetic figure I had become. Fortunately, only once did someone approach me from behind, and I paused at a conveniently-located spot on the sidewalk to look at an adjacent small ravine and its creek, thereby allowing the young fellow to pass me by before I continued on my feeble way.
I could not have out-walked anyone.
It took far longer to get home than I ever expected.
I was not exactly in any pain. It was just as if the muscle alongside my shin had stiffened right up and lost all of its function.
I do not remember this ever happening to me in my younger years, so I dearly hope that if I keep active where walking is concerned, my fitness will improve and this situation will no longer arise.
For now, I am rather hobbled where walking is concerned. I went out this morning for a walk, leaving home perhaps around 5:30 a.m. Wearing a different pair of boots, the same condition began to develop. My round trip was maybe 3½ miles, but by the end of it I was again approaching uselessness as a pedestrian.
I am speculating that maybe I will give up doing calf-raises. I don't manage to do the exercise every day without fail, but I manage to do them on a 'daily' basis each week more often that I miss days. I don't do one-legged calf raises ─ I do both legs at once, and for a total of 111 repetitions.
But maybe because I am only as of this month trying to get back into anything like regular walking, the strain of both calf raises and the walking has overworked that specific muscle. I don't know the name of the muscle for certain, but it just might be the tibialis anterior.
At any rate, I am going to have to suspend my longer walks ─ the 8¾-mile ventures that involve a 2¾-mile stretch of railway tracks.
I wonder if those railway tracks could also be at fault? Stumbling along that irregular terrain ─ in the dark, no less ─ for 2¾ miles undoubtedly offers a considerable challenge to all of the muscles that are even remotely involved in locomotion.
At present, I have no choice but to limit my walking to the local area in which I live, and save the greater ventures for that time when my status improves and then normalizes once again.
I want to mention a so-called Christmas movie that helped keep me up Friday evening for a tad over 40 minutes before I cancelled out of it, and then finished watching it Saturday afternoon ─ I was using our T9 Android 8.1 TV Box to find sources for the movie.
The movie was not all that much a Christmas movie ─ not by any of the criteria I use. It was just more or less a family drama that took place just ahead of Christmas, and then ended Christmas Day without anything having been resolved or finalized.
I hate movies like that ─ they're a waste of time.
The movie was titled Happy Christmas, and had a reality or documentary feel to it. In fact, the production almost seemed amateurish.
One of the leads was an actress with an English or Aussie accent who was so darned familiar to me that it became annoying that I could not place her ─ the name Melanie Lynskey certainly meant nothing to me.
I finally had to look her up in Wikipedia, and was enlightened with considerable surprise ─ she played the recurring character "Rose" who was an ongoing thorn in Charlie Harper's side during the run of the T.V. series Two and a Half Men. I guess what threw off my effort to recall just where I knew the actress from was her accent ─ her normal New Zealand tongue was never evident in that series.
In the movie, however, she spoke natively.
It's only a little after 4:30 p.m. right now, but I am in need of a nap, so I am going to cease work on this post and publish it.
Note that my younger brother ─ who left Friday morning on a deer hunting trip with an occasional drinking buddy of his whom I have never met ─ has yet to return.
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